Adjust Tracking: The Surprise Success of Metallica's Video for "One"

In the late evening hours of early 1989, MTV played the video for "One" by Metallica for the first time. Though it was the third single from …And Justice for All—the band’s second album for Elektra Records and their fourth in an eight-year career—"One" was the first video that Metallica ever made. If it had purely been done as a concession to try to get new fans, on facts alone, it did a pretty crappy job. Running well over seven minutes, it featured stark black and white shots of the band playing in an empty warehouse and it was intercut with worn footage from Johnny Got His Gun, a rare 1971 film about an American World War I casualty who loses all his limbs, his facial features, and his ability to communicate verbally.

In short, the video was a serious bummer. Yet, it transformed Metallica into dirty-haired titans of mainstream rock.

While we can pinpoint the rise of grunge at the start of the 1990s as what ended the non-stop party within MTV’s regular rotation of highly manicured pop and hair metal videos heavy on babes/puerile behavior, other forces had been steadily chipping away at the channel’s glossy veneer. The surprise success of "One" marked an early victory for bleakness. "Bon Jovi ruled the world and we had our little place in it," says Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the phone after fulfilling his suburban dad duties for the morning. "It turned out there were many, many, many disenfranchised kids who wanted their music heavier and darker. Obviously it had been coming, but nobody knew what to expect."

Prior to the release of "One", Metallica was best known, if known at all, as a Bay Area-based thrash metal band that cultivated pockets of devoted fans and consciously pissed on the conventions of the music industry. Though their prior album, 1986’s Master of Puppets, went gold in its first year of release, it did so with hardly any commercial radio play and without videos, which the band stubbornly refused to make.

While the band was on tour in Paris in late October of 1988, two months after …And Justice for All’s release, their managers Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch approached them with a video concept for "One". It was the pair’s idea to incorporate parts of Johnny Got His Gun, a story whose subject mirrored frontman James Hetfield’s lyrics. The film had been directed by Dalton Trumbo in the '70s and was an adaptation of a book of his that was published in 1939. Trumbo was an infamous figure, a screenwriter who was blacklisted in the 1940s for his interest in Communism, but who would go on to create scripts for films including an Oscar-winner for Roman Holiday, which was done under the name of a friend, and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. (The Bryan Cranston-starring biopic Trumbo is expected to be released sometime in 2015.)

While other videos had been clumsily cutting in parts of whatever new movie they were on the soundtrack of for years, none of them tried to fully integrate in segments of an old movie to create a tone. And none of them featured a soldier begging his superiors to euthanize him as he banged his head against his bed in Morse code. "The idea took precedent over the assumption that we had to do a video because that’s what you did when you were putting out your next single," Ulrich explains. "We were pretty comfortable with the idea right away—dare I say even excited about it."

Though the video for "One" officially doesn’t have a director, the main technician behind it was Michael Salomon, a USC film school graduate who had become the go-to editor for several music video directors and production companies around Los Angeles. Salomon specialized in hair metal and country, and had never heard Metallica prior to the gig. One of his main editing clients was director Wayne Isham, who had already worked extensively with acts including Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, and Bon Jovi. "I don’t know exactly how I got the Metallica job," says Salomon, "but I have a feeling that they probably went to Wayne first."

In I Want My MTV, the oral history that covers the channel’s first decade, Isham says, "I’d been a Metallica fan since Ride the Lightning, I thought they were fucking awesome. I kept begging [Elektra executive] Robin Sloane to let me do a video for them. The opportunity came with ‘One,’ but I couldn’t figure out how to combine the footage from Johnny Got His Gun with performance footage. I choked." (Isham would eventually work on many projects with Metallica, starting in the Black Album era of the early '90s.)

Ulrich remembers it differently, explaining that it was Salomon’s few directing credits that made him appealing to the band. "The idea that we would have someone like Michael Salomon—who wasn’t a name director who was going to come in and fuck with whatever the Metallica mentality was or turn us into Warrant—felt as autonomous as the way we were making records," he says.

Metallica’s performance for the low budget "One" was filmed in early December of 1988, around the time of their two headlining shows at the Long Beach Arena. "We showed up at a warehouse and played the song 20 times, and that was about it," says Ulrich of their first music video experience.

This footage was shot by Bill Pope, a cinematographer who went on to work on feature films including The Matrix trilogy, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Sam Raimi’s second and third Spider-Man movies. Though Salomon and Pope are sometimes listed as co-directors of "One", Salomon says there wasn’t much collaboration between them. "I was on set for a few hours while they were filming and that was the last time I saw Bill," he explains, noting that he’s had about 10 minutes of conversation with Pope in his lifetime.

From there, Salomon’s challenge became figuring how to condense a 111-minute film into a seven-minute video, while still dedicating half of that time to footage of the band. To make things more complicated, he was told there were no existing prints of Johnny Got His Gun in the United States. "They found one shitty video copy in Italy somewhere that didn’t have subtitles on it," says Salomon. "The quality of it was awful."

The editing process took a long time, with Salomon going back-and-forth for several rounds with the band. They ended up with three versions of the video: the complete one that stuck to the original concept, a shortened take of the song incorporating both the performance footage and the film, and a "jammin’ version" with just Metallica. Despite all this work, it was entirely possible that this whole thing would be a fruitless exercise. "Keep in mind that no one thought that anyone was ever going to play any of this," says Salomon. "This is a band that nobody knows—they had a huge cult following, but they had no airplay. These were just these unknown guys that had rabid fans."

Even with the video’s bleak content, MTV’s standards and practices department never requested that they change anything after the full video was submitted. "It was a dark subject, but there’s nothing rude in it," says Salomon. "I cut out the scene where the nurse masturbates the guy, so there was nothing objectionable."

On January 30, 1989, the Monday after "One" made its late night debut on MTV over the weekend, Metallica was in a shitty hotel in Texas during a day off from tour. It was the first time that the video was eligible for "Dial MTV", the proto-"TRL" countdown show controlled by viewers. Ulrich says when "One" didn’t make any of the bottom slots, the band was upset, but as the show went on, they realized they may be somewhere near the top. "One" debuted at the number one slot and was quickly put into MTV’s regular rotation and climbed the station-controlled weekly countdown show.

At the end of February, Metallica was invited to perform at the Grammy Awards. They played an abridged version of "One", blasting pyro with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder in the front row. They were expected to win the first Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance, but ended up losing to Jethro Tull, one of the most infamously Grammy-esque moments in Grammy history.

Salomon went on to direct the Metallica concert video Live Shit: Binge & Purge, but has spent most of the past 25 years making high-profile country music videos, including dozens for Toby Keith. Still, "One" has remained a key credit in career. "Oddly enough, it’s probably what I’m most known for," he says. "Almost everybody, even in the country world, is like, You did that? It was so effective. I was depressed for weeks after I saw it the first time."

But in the immediate wake of "One" beginning to take off, the group wasn’t really thinking about how it would impact their future. "This was not really stuff that we paid attention to. Words like ‘demographics’ and ‘fanbase,’ that was not really our thing," says Ulrich. "In '89, we just discovered Jäegermeister, we didn’t necessarily sit there and keep track of this shit."